Swinley Forest 'will take years to recover'

Restoration work has begun at Swinley Forest where forest fires damaged 300 hectares of woodland earlier this month.

Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service (RBFRS) handed the management of the land between Bracknell and Crowthorne back to the Forestry Commission and Crown Estates last week.

Forester Nick Hazlitt, from the Forestry Commission, said: “The forest goes through a continual cycle of development, harvesting and renewal and parts of that have been put back by up to 15 years.

“The recovery has started and nature has begun to reassert herself and ground vegetation has come back.

“We are going to have two or three years of intensive restoration work. Even if we did nothing it’s going to be up to four years before signs of the fire disappear.

“The animals will have been severely impacted and may take many years to get back to the numbers before the fire.”

Of the Forestry Commission’s timber work, Mr Hazlitt said: “That has been interrupted and we will have to review our plans and programmes for the more mature timber.

“Support from the local community offering to help choked me up, really, because it was so heartfelt.”

Most of the fire crews withdrew from the site late last week, although the area was patrolled between 9am and 6pm last Thursday and Friday.

Twnety miles of hose line was recovered from the forest and sent to the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst to be cleaned and returned to high-volume pumps and hose boxes.

Deputy chief fire officer Olaf Baars of RBFRS said: “This is one of the largest incidents the fire and rescue service has dealt with since World War II and I am proud of the way in which we have all responded.”

In Parliament, both Prime Minister David Cameron and Bracknell MP Dr Phillip Lee have praised the firefighters for the way they tackled the blaze.